Five minutes later, as I ruffled through my bag, I came to a sudden heart-dropping realization that I had forgotten my wallet at the office, and was therefore riding in his cab without a single cent of money (OH SH!T.) Annnnd, of course, my phone was at 5% battery and ready to die.

I decided to play it cool and not let the cabbie know, while in my head I started wondering what I could give him in exchange for the ride over (nothing sexual -___-). Inside my bag was a nasty old orange umbrella, an eel-skin business cardholder, and a red and white Canada lanyard I'd bought in a dollar store back home (so, basically nothing).

I couldn't even ask him to go to an ATM since I didn't have my debit or Octopus card on me. In the end, I made a desperate call to the people organizing the event at Cen-tral Pla-zaa and managed to explain my situation, and they agreed to come down to the taxi stand and pay my cab fare (phew).

Of course, when I finally told the cabbie the news as he was pulling up to Cen-tral Pla-zaa, he was anything but happy.

"What?! You know I can't stop here," he complained. "Once someone comes I'm going to have to move!"

"I know, sorry," I said, and then sat silently waiting for my rescue.

He continued, "What is this, some kind of joke? I've never had this happen to me before, geezus..."

We sat in silence again as the meter beeped every few minutes.

"Oh great, now there's someone behind me. See, now I have to move my car!" he whined.

A few minutes later, he added, "I can't believe this is happening. I'm about to get off work and you pull this kind of shit on me--" and that was when I had just about enough.

"What, you think I wanted this?!" I yelled at him. "You think I forgot my wallet on purpose!?"

That shut him up for a few awkward minutes before he got heckled again by the building staff to clear the area. As they bantered back and forth about whether anyone was coming at all, the receiver of my collect-cab finally arrived, paid my cab fare and released me from my cabbie hostage situation.

Even though I've lived in Hong Kong for the last three years, there are still so many things that make me cringe, curse or want to punch someone out. You'd think that I'd have gotten used to it by now, but nope. Here they are in no particular order:

This weekend, I scored my first ever goal for my soccer team (yay!)... OK so it was just a friendly game against a bunch of Hong Kong men in their 50s, but it was still a pretty awesome goal.

How it went down was -- I happened to be in front of the goal when a shot was fired by my teammate Carrie from the right side, which hit the top goal post and came bouncing towards me. Out of reflex (or skill, but highly unlikely), I bounced the ball off my chest and then kicked it over the goalie’s right shoulder straight into the goal (crowd roars while announcer shouts ‘GOOOOOOOOOOOAL!’).

Suhweet, eh!? While the high-5s from my teammates and shocked expressions from the old men were pretty damn satisfying, I knew I was only in the right place at the right time, which obviously counts for something in soccer. At that point, I was so exhausted from running around for 40 minutes straight in 29C weather on a bumpy pitch that I decided to take a break on the sidelines. Little did I know that there was an army of gnats (read: pin-sized blood-sucking mini-mosquitoes) waiting to start their all-you-can-eat Miss Fong buffet.

Within two minutes, all of my limbs were itching like crazy and the creepiest thing was I couldn’t see any bugs at all. I thought it might have been my imagination at first, but the 15-20 red bite marks I found on just one leg alone the next day proved otherwise. Not to mention how insanely itchy all of the bites are!! Gaaah... I think I have about 35-50 bites in total just on my legs, some of which are so close together it looks like I’ve got the chicken pox all over again! Damn you, invisible gnats!

So the lesson here is: bring bug spray to soccer games and... what you can’t see CAN bite you (deep, I know).